Oh, River City Ransom. For you youngsters out there, RCR was a brawler in which stumpy Japanese, er, I mean American kids beat the barf out of each other across an 8-bit open world (15-years before the term “open world” even existed). It also had naked butts. Heh heh. The game wasn’t a huge hit when it was first released, but it’s held up far better than your average NES game and picked up a pretty solid cult following since then.

Well, more River City Ransommay soon be on the way, because River City Random: Underground has just hit Kickstarter. The game is essentially a 16-bit update to the RCR formula, and unlike a lot of the “spiritual successors” to classic 8 and 16-bit games you see on Kickstarter, River City Ransom: Underground is actually officially licensed. Yup, whatever remains of Technos (the original developers of RCR) has declared this a real River City Ransom game.

Hit the jump to check out the standard Kickstarter hype video…

Okay, so the head guy making the game is a bit of a ham, but the game itself looks pretty damn good to me. And hey, they’re only asking for $180,000, which is a fair price to ask for new River City Ransom I’d say — particularly considering some of the junk that’s accumulated far more dough on Kickstarter.

Just one problem — where’s the console port stretch goal? I’ll play River City Ransom on a computer I guess, but it won’t feel quite right.

I still pop in my NES copy of River City Ransom from time to time. Just recently to prove to a few friends that it’s the game Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was cribbing notes from.
Also, I think I broke my hand trying to shove money through my monitor. TAKE IT!

I too owned this on the NES, and could never figure out how to get into the school at the end. I had to read about jumping on top of the basketball hoop in Nintendo Power after the fact. I was retarded when I was a kid.